Crucified Toad
by campylobacter
Summary: 10-year-old Scully shows a 12-year-old boy her secret hideout. Who is he, and why is he so mysterious? I challenged myself to write Mulder & Sully meeting as kids, yet preserve future canon. Set on Sunday, 16 June 1974, Father's Day.
1. Chapter 1

_A long, long time ago, there lived a toad named Mr. Wharton Oddbottom who dwelt in a velvety, green marsh. One early winter day he hopped to a wee tidal pool to sun himself at the water's edge, only to find that the pool had receded to a small puddle in the center. Hoping to escape the chill wind, Mr. Oddbottom slogged through the muck to reach the last of the water, where he submerged himself in the warm mud and contentedly fell asleep._

* * *

A not so long time ago, little girl named Dana trampled through scrub and brush to visit Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. When she arrived within a stone's throw of Uranus, she saw, through the bushes, a strange boy peering into its dark opening. Dana watched him carefully inspect the large concrete drainage pipe before putting his head and shoulders inside. He appeared to be listening for something.

Before she could react, he disappeared into the pipe on his hands and knees, piece by piece: blue shirt, rumpled jeans, dirty sneakers vanishing into the dark of the hole.

Dana waited for him to exit, but the minutes were too long, and the summer too short. She crept closer, surveying the late afternoon landscape around her hideout for other intruders. Occasional insects swayed lazily in the amber sunshine above scruffy, scentless wildflowers. The rest of the gully revealed no one.

She wondered if the boy had reached Tunnel Pluto, her hideout; or if he had discovered her stash of toys; or if he were eating her candy.

She did not see him carrying a flashlight, and hoped her belongings were safely hidden in darkness. She considered the possibility that maybe he had passed her secret fort and was continuing farther to where the teenagers would hang out and smoke in Jupiter, the larger, main culvert that opened near Westmoreland Avenue.

Positioning her ear closer to the tunnel, she listened for reasons not to follow him, but heard only the false silence of air softly whooshing through the tunnel. Without further hesitation, Dana hopped into the cool, dry pipe and began crawling toward her underground hideout. She passed the sign she had chalked onto the smooth, curved walls:

KEEP OUT! NO TRESPASSERS!

A skull and crossbones emphasized her warning. Why had the boy paid no attention to it? Dana turned on her flashlight, which reminded her that he could not have read her sign in the dark. When she looked back, the sunlight beyond the end of the pipe shone like a bright, waning moon, partially eclipsed by the sloping angle of the tunnel. Realizing that her flashlight's beam might betray her presence and drain the batteries, she turned it off.

Continuing in the increasingly cooler underground darkness, Dana listened for the boy, but heard nothing save her own noises. She knew she had passed her second chalked warning because of a slightly sharper upturn between pipe sections. The warning read:

STAY AWAY! NUCLEAR MUTANT TOAD!

If revealed by light, the three joined triangles carefully drawn within a circle in green chalk would bear witness to Dana's pride in not spelling it "nucular", the way her big brother pronounced it.

Only one more sign remained before Tunnel Neptune.

Suddenly, Dana heard a strange sound: a sharp, truncated croak or bark. She froze, startled. After the odd, distorted echoes had faded, she convinced herself that the boy had made the noise. If he had tried to frighten her, he failed; the sound had been more comical than menacing.

She crept carefully along the passage, straining to hear more sounds. She knew she had reached her third sign, because she felt the sudden yawn of a branching tunnel. In yellow chalk, her warning, if seen, read:

INTRUDERS WILL BE VIVISEPULTURED

Dana was dissatisfied with this sign, because her handwriting had gone sort of wobbly and looked as though she had misspelled the last word. She was glad the boy had no light by which to read.

She sat still and listened intently. The boy was definitely in this second tunnel; she could hear breathing. Or maybe he was sniffling, for the breathing was ragged. Did he have a cold? Was he crying? Was he scared? Had he lost his way? At those thoughts, Dana stopped worrying about the intrusion on her hideout. She turned on her flashlight and shone it into Tunnel Neptune, in the direction of the sniffling sounds.


	2. Chapter 2

_Mr. Wharton Oddbottom awoke from his deep, cold slumber when an excavator broke him out of solid stone. Imagine his surprise to see gigantic, strange, babbling creatures and dry dust and dirt where once stood his beautiful marsh! He was mortified to discover that he could not, try as he might, open his mouth, and it hurt to breathe. The only words he could utter were barking noises through his nose._

* * *

The beam of Dana's flashlight revealed a huddle of long arms and legs; buried somewhere between chest and knees was a headful of dark hair. She wondered how this boy had fit inside the tunnel. After a few moments, he noticed the light and lifted his head toward her.

"...ssama-?" he mumbled in a quavery voice. "...they gonna take me, too?" He blinked and squinted in the flashlight's beam.

"Who?" asked Dana, noticing the frightened look on his face. "I'm not 'Sam'. I'm a girl." Even in grimy overalls, and with her long ginger curls bound into a ponytail, Dana had never been mistaken for a boy.

The boy lifted his hand to shield the light from his eyes. Dana lowered her flashlight and allowed it to point toward the wall. They studied each other for a beat. Although he seemed confused that she was not who he thought she was, he asked, "Did you follow me here?" Anger edged his voice.

"You're trespassing on my secret hideout," she retorted.

"Trespassing? This is a public storm drain. You don't own it." His voice grew more confident, and its squeakless tenor revealed that he was older than she had assumed.

"It's not public; it's military," she snapped. "This is Miramar Naval Air Base. You must be a civilian."

"You must be, too, unless the Navy recruits little girls."

"My dad's a Commander. He's gonna be a Captain, soon."

The boy laughed. "That doesn't mean you own the place. Besides, it's Father's Day. Why are you spending it in a concrete pipe?"

"He's shipped out. He'll be back next week. You're not with your dad, either."

"So you want me to split, Dana?"

Dana flinched at the mention of her name. How did he know? Then her eyes caught the direction he was looking.

On the naked, concrete sides of the tunnel, revealed by the flashlight's beam, various messages in charcoal and multicolored chalk proclaimed:

CHARLIE EATS BOOGERS :-d  
BILLY STINKS :-p  
DANA [heart] RICKY =)  
BILLY IS GAY! GAY GAY GAY!  
MISSY HATES BOYS ;-[

Various cartoons and smiley faces illustrated each point.

While she crouched speechless, wishing the boy had seen "vivisepultured" instead, he said, "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out which is your name."

Dana had no wish to explain who Ricky was. "You're wrong, smartass. I'm Melissa. Missy, for short."

He looked at her, unconvinced.

She turned the subject on him: "You said 'Sam' or something when you saw me. Who's that?"

The boy sighed. "It's uh, um, Sam. Just call me Sam." Some of his wise-guy attitude seemed to disappear. It didn't take a rocket scientist to tell he was lying, too.

"You want me to call you Sam, even though that's not your name?"

"You want me to call you Missy, don't you?"

Dana shrugged. In a dark, close tunnel, she had cornered a boy older than and maybe as cute as Richard Johansen, Beckons Wanted champion and son of Lt. Commander Christopher Johansen. "Fine. I'm going to my hideout, Sam, and you're in my way. Kindly remove yourself from this tunnel and let me pass. You tell anyone and you're a dead man."

"Yeah, right! Like anyone gives a crap. I'm only here for the weekend. I doubt the yachters in Connecticut care about some third grade Navy brat in a San Diego sewer."

"I'm not in third grade. I'm going into sixth."

"Your sophisticated cave art had me fooled. How old are you?"

"I'm ten. How old are you?"

"I'll be thirteen in October."

"So what are you doing in a sixth grader's fort? Shouldn't you be doing teenager stuff, instead?"

"Like what? Vandalizing public property?" He pointed to a crooked bunny face drawing.

"No. But if you keep going up the tunnel, I'll show you. You'd be the only one who's ever seen my fort."

He frowned, as if her suggestion were the last thing he wanted to do. Then he looked at what she was holding and asked, "Can I use your flashlight?"

"Sure. Are you chickenshit?"

"No ma'am, I'm a fox," he replied, in a bad imitation of Elvis Presley. "I eat chickens, thankyouverymuch."

Dana burst out laughing. "You're weird."

"So are you."

"Well, go ahead, Mr. Fox," she teased.

"Don't call me that." He grabbed the flashlight and began to crawl up the underground passage. With his every movement, mad shadows slid on the walls in a silent game of leapfrog.


	3. Chapter 3

_Mr. Wharton Oddbottom soon found himself in the care of a kindly gent who placed him in a new, strange pond. Unfortunately, Mr. Oddbottom's mouth still would not open, and he found no way to avail himself of the multitude of bugly morsels placed before him. His hunger unabated, Mr. Oddbottom languished, and once again he went to sleep - this time, never to wake._

* * *

Dana and the boy stopped beside another branching tunnel that sloped upward. The air issuing from its darkness smelled staler and damper. The boy shined the beam on a single chalked glyph that appeared to be the letters "P" and "L", merged.

"Pluto?"

Dana was impressed that he knew a planetary symbol. "Yep. It's the name of the tunnel. You wanna go first?"

"It looks a little smaller. Will we both fit when we get there?"

"Sure. It opens up wider. Go ahead."

When they reached the end, a small, boxy stone chamber accommodated them enough for the boy to extend his long legs across the room and to sit up straight without hunching his head and shoulders as he had in the tunnels.

"It sure feels good to stretch," he said, making popping noises with his neck.

"How tall are you?" asked Dana, lighting a candle from her secret stash.

"Five-eight-and-three-fourths, last I measured. If I grow some more this summer, I might play forward on my basketball team."

"You're shorter than my big brother. Want some M&Ms?" She passed him a brown bag of candy.

"Thanks." He shook out a handful. "This place seems like it really was built to be a hideout. Or a big coffin. I wonder who made it and what it was for? It's not draining anything. And it's not concrete, like the rest of the pipes. It looks like it's carved from solid stone."

"Maybe the workers made it for equipment, and then ran out of money. My dad complains about that kind of stuff happening all the time. I like these tunnels 'cuz my big brother is claustrophobic, my sister thinks they're poop sewers, and my little brother is afraid." She placed her chin on the lens of the flashlight, attempting to transfigure her face into eerie shadow. "I told him there's a giant, blind toad in these pipes, hunting for eyes, and if you're really quiet, you can hear it hopping around."

The boy scoffed. "What kind of wuss would want to believe such a stupid story?"

Without warning, the candle went out; complete darkness drowned them in a swift, rising tide.

"Holy crap. I can't see," squeaked the boy, coughing on what he was eating.

Dana held her breath, trying not to laugh, because it was she who had extinguished both flashlight and candle. This was the first time she had ever been in the chamber without light; however, it seemed a different place in complete darkness, hostile and unfamiliar. Her eyes held the blazing afterimage of the flashlight's beam, a fading kaleidoscope of swirling, menacing phantasms.

"Missy? Missy, this is not funny. Where's the flashlight?" She heard him fumbling noisily toward her. One of his groping hands grazed her knee. "C'mon. Quit screwin' around."

She was on the verge of yelling "Boo!" when a strange, loud noise clattered in the tunnel.

"Oh crud," she whispered, frantically flailing out to contact the other kid for assurance. "Did you hear that?"

They sat without moving in the darkness, listening. The gritty, crunching sound receded down the tunnel, as if a heavy, round object were clumsily rolling down the concrete tube. Dana swallowed and tried to listen past her pounding heart.

"Aw, dang. Crap. Shit," she groaned. "That was my Magic 8 Ball. You must've knocked it into Tunnel Pluto. It's gonna keep rolling down Tunnel Neptune until it reaches Tunnel Uranus."

"'Tunnel your anus'? When it rolls into Uranus, I hope it cracks open and poisons you with its toxic blue liquid."

Dana turned on the flashlight with shaking fingers. Light chased away most of the darkness, but somehow, the shadows seemed heavier than before. The boy was sulking sourly against the opposite wall.

"Sorry I scared you," she said. "But I got scared, too. I promise not to do it again."

"There's something wrong with this place," he muttered, as if he had not heard her. "There's no reason for anyone to build it. It's just creepy. This room and the connecting tunnel are older than the other tunnels. It just doesn't make sense."

Dana nervously re-lit the candle. It was one of those clear, tall glasses filled with garishly-colored wax that her mom had bought to light at the altars in church. The brightness that it cast added an immediately comforting glow to the chamber. Dana lit another candle: a small, squat votive that reeked of fake strawberry. The shadows in the chamber became less threatening.

"How much junk have you dragged in here?" he asked, finally noticing the contents of the room in the brighter light.

"This old music box, because my radio didn't get any stations here," answered Dana. "Five, no, seven candles. Matches, chalk, pen, pencil, M&Ms, that 8 Ball, a book bag, and those books." She pointed to a stack in the corner next to him. "That's what I was going to show you."

The boy leafed through the pile. "What a load of kid stuff," he complained. "_Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret_? Girl crap. _Ripley's Believe It or Not #9_? That's old; I've got all of them up to number twenty. _The Dunwich Horror_-"

"That's not kid stuff," interrupted Dana.

"Yeah, whatever." A magazine caught his attention. "Hey! Hand me the flashlight." Although the language in which it was published was Italian, the photographs required no translation.

Dana smiled triumphantly as she passed him the light. "I'm gonna be a porno girl when I grow up."

The boy ignored her, and became engrossed in flipping through the pages. "This shows _way_ more than _Playboy_ magazine does," he mused, staring at the naked women spreading their legs and showing off their painted fingernails. He looked as though he had never seen anything of its kind.

"But I tell everyone that I wanna be a science teacher," she continued. They call me 'Dana-Braina' and 'Shorty', she thought, but they never call me pretty.

His eyes never left the pages. "Teachers are boring and they don't make any money. I'm gonna be something exciting, like a pro basketball player or an astronaut."

"You gotta have good grades to be an astronaut."

"I do. And all my classes are advanced." He continued to stare at a photo of a grinning woman wearing nothing but a man's necktie. Dana saw that it was the page on which she had added a moustache, gap-teeth, and the phrase I EAT POO CHUNKS.

"So maybe you could be a doctor instead," suggested Dana. "And help others."

"Help others? Who cares? I wanna distinguish myself." He finally turned the page.

"Being a doctor is distinguished."

"There are jillions of doctors in the world, but only a few people ever get to go into space," he said, squinting at a blonde with black pubic hair, penciled-in devil horns, and happy faces on her breasts, the nipples serving as noses. "I wanna fly in a spaceship someday."

"That's probably not as fun as it sounds," Dana mumbled, peeved that the boy wouldn't comment on her enhancements to the magazine.

He didn't reply, and kept flipping pages. He never said a word about the photo she had accurately labeled with the proper terms OUTER LABIA, CLITORIS, and PERINEUM.

Dana became bored after a few more minutes. "I stole that magazine from my brother. He whacked off with it."

The boy dropped the magazine as if it had suddenly caught fire. "The brother who you wrote 'GAY! GAY GAY GAY!' about?"

"Huh?" Dana failed to connect his reference to her old graffiti.

"Never mind. Got any more candy?"

"Yeah, but if you eat any more, you'll get thirsty, and I don't have anything here to drink."

"You just don't wanna share."

"I can do what I want. It's my fort."

"Don't your parents ever worry about letting you play alone like a sewer rat?"

"Do military guys kidnap kids?"

The boy closed his eyes and turned his head away. "Sure. Whatever. I'm splitting." He started crawling toward the tunnel. "You and your unholy fort deserve each other."

"Hey! Gimme back my flashlight, you dork!" Dana lunged for the boy, who didn't bother putting up a fight. In a few seconds, he had left the chamber and began fumbling his way down the chilly darkness of Tunnel Pluto. Dana clutched her flashlight, which began to dim from prolonged usage, and listened to the slap of his palms and the drag of his shoes as he crawled away.


	4. Chapter 4

_Journal entry (excerpt) of Stuart Horner, President of the Natural History Society, April 10, 1865:_

_I am quite at a loss with how to proceed concerning the remains of this most curious batrachian creature. My purview does not encompass the biological sciences; however, an innate thirst for knowledge impels me to request the services of a herpetologist who is willing to perform a necropsy to determine whether the unique morphology of this toad is explained in its physiology…_

* * *

Dana looked around her hideout. The boy was right; it was creepy and coffin-like. If something unpleasant were to happen, no one above ground could hear her cries for help. She considered the worst possible sequence of events: her family would never find her; Tunnel Pluto would be her final resting place; she'd die and lay entombed, like a mummy whose treasures for the afterlife were sooty candles and a tattered porno mag.

In preparation for vacating her fort, she began to stuff everything into her crumpled book bag. While packing the books, she thought the noises she made were somehow doubled, almost like echoes, but without reverberation. They seemed to occur a fraction of a second _before_ she made noise. The air in the chamber felt heavier and colder; the unexpected flickers of candlelight created ugly patches of shadow on the walls.

Suddenly, a cold, hard hand clamped her shoulder. "Kill the lights. Now."

Dana choked on an unvoiced scream, and turned to face the terrified countenance of the boy who had so recently vacated her hideout. The paleness of his face contrasted against the dark, damp strands of hair on his forehead.

"I said now," he whispered. "There's something in the tunnel."

Dana froze. She watched the boy shove past her and blow out the two candles. The orange, glowing wick-embers faded too quickly to black. In the assailing darkness, the smell of scorched wax stung their sinuses.

Dana then heard sniffles issuing from the outer tunnel.

Sniffling, snuffling, inhuman breathing sounds, barely audible, echoed through the pipe. They grew louder by unwelcome degrees as the minutes passed. The most alarming aspect about the sniffing was the apparent diligence of the sniffer, and the care it took to inhale the scent of every inch of concrete on its approach.

Dana crept as noiselessly as she could to where she thought the boy crouched. She nudged his side, gripped his arm, and pressed her lips to his ear.

"Dog?" she breathed, knowing somehow that whatever was out there was not canine.

She felt him shake his head in negation. He turned, and pressed his mouth to her ear.

"It walks. Two legs."

Dana felt her rapidly beating heart flutter, felt the rush of blood to her ears squelch all other sound. Her lips silently formed a familiar mantra: _Hail Mary, full of grace… pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death…_

The noises grew louder, closer. The boy drew himself into a tighter huddle.

Suddenly, the sniffing stopped. The boy's body stiffened abruptly. Both children held their breath and strained to hear; the silence was like a soundless scream. No matter how hard they stared in the direction of exit, the darkness remained impenetrable.

Dana felt, rather than heard, a presence approach them with infinite slowness. A sharp, chemical scent filled the chamber and gradually intensified.

In an odd perceptual flash, the image of The Nuclear Mutant Toad leapt into her mind, summoned by a shred of memory: Her little brother Charlie had followed her once to Tunnel Uranus, only to be repelled by his sister's preposterous but effective confabulation of a giant, eyeless toad on the hunt to pluck out someone's eyes for its own use. "Come on," she had said. "You can go first and see if it's true."

To suspect that the unseen presence which currently threatened her were the manifestation of her own spurious toad story caused Dana's fear to dissolve into shame. The older boy trembling beside her no longer reinforced her terror, but aroused her sympathy. His vulnerability to fright in her own hideout, whose refuge had been a secret luxury to her amidst the clamor of a large family, elicited both a protective instinct and a primitive rage within her. She could no longer cower when her legs itched to run, to kick, to stomp. The blood in her head boiled into anger and demanded immediate action.

Dana's sweaty hand aimed the flashlight and flicked the switch.

Nothing happened.

That is, the flashlight's beam did cast forth its stuttering light, but it illumined nothing save the same old chamber, and the same old tunnel - empty.

"Holy crap," sighed the boy, in an exhalation of cautious relief. "Do you think there's still something in the outer tunnel that we can't see?"

"Nah. It was nothing," she said with artificial calm. "It _must_ be nothing. Follow me." Dana scooted down the tunnel, playing the jittery flashlight beam in all directions. "Nothing. See? Nothing, nothing, noth—"

In the concrete tunnel Neptune, giant, wet, animal tracks spiraled up and around the walls. They discontinued at the entrance to Tunnel Pluto. The prints appeared as slanted fans with knobs at the outer ends: toad tracks.

"You'd better take a look at this," she called to the boy, who had not followed her. Her pounding heart had nearly subsided to a dull tattoo.

"You'd better take a look at what's in here, first," he called back.

Dana returned to the chamber to see the boy picking at something in the ceiling.

"Turn off that damn light," he ordered, his voice revealing no trace of fear.

"I'm not falling for that one again."

The boy turned to her, impatiently. "Listen; when you left with the flashlight, I could see a blue outline of light in the stone, right here." He slapped the low ceiling from his crouching position. "I think there's a room above us, and that's a trap door."

"But there's humongoloid giant toad tracks out there," she countered. "They stop at Tunnel Pluto. They might evaporate before you get to see them."

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, as though the act of inhaling her opposing urgency would fortify his patience. "Look, I take your word for it," he said, opening his eyes and fixing them on hers. Although his eye color was lost in the dim light, his sincerity was not. "This door might only open while the blue light is glowing behind it. Just point the light away, and maybe you'll see."

Dana reluctantly smothered the lens against her stomach. In the darkened chamber, she looked to where the boy had been trying to pry the camouflaged stone tile. Just as he had said, a thin, blue line of light traced a square roughly the size of a medicine cabinet.

"Oh my god. I've never noticed that before."

"Gimme a hand."

Dana set down the flashlight, and instead of trying to pull down the tile, she pressed upward. A stony, grating sound rewarded her efforts, and the tile budged noticeably. Their two pairs of hands lifted and slid the stone to reveal a squared opening into another chamber, which was suffused with a dim, bluish phosphorescence.

"Chickenshits first," she quipped.

Without hesitation, the boy picked up the flashlight and wielded it before him as though it were a gun. He raised it into the opening, casting the flickering beam around before slowly following the flashlight into the upper chamber with his head.

"Like wow! Far out shit!"

"Lemme see! I wanna see!"


	5. Chapter 5

_Journal entry (excerpt) of Stuart Horner, April 24, 1865:_

_Although loth to admit myself naif, I here confess that I have been swindled by a charlatan posing as a 'Robertrand Nutbutter, Professor of Cryptozoology'. The ridiculousness of the name, upon which politeness had prevented me from remarking, should have alerted me to the likelihood that my volunteering—nay, insisting, that he take on loan the remains of the dis-entombed toad for further study would be the result of my misplaced confidence in his artful ruse._

* * *

After much squeezing, squishing, and scraping through the opening, Dana and the boy crouched in the center of the upper chamber and gaped at the display.

The words PANJANDRUM BOB'S TIME CAPSULE OF CURIOSITIES, rendered in an unsettling circus typeface, were painted on a panel of glowing blue glass mounted on one wall. In the chilly, other-worldly light it cast about the chamber, various strange gadgets and grotesqueries rested in a leisurely coating of glittery dust.

From the overwhelming jumble of antiques, Dana proudly identified a bottle of German wine, an 1886 calendar from England, a rickety zoetrope, and a broken Newton's Cradle.

The boy exclaimed over a crumbling Fiji mermaid, a Comte de Fortsas catalogue, and…

"A crucified toad. Look."

In clearish liquid contained within a large glass jar floated a large toad, belly forward, fore limbs open and extended, hind limbs stretched downward in a crude parody of Roman crucifixion. Upon further examination, Dana ascertained that the toad had been tied in its unnatural position to two glass rods lashed into a T armature.

"I don't believe it—the Hartlepool toad," said the boy, who began to read aloud from text. "'April 7, 1865. During excavations for the Hartlepool waterworks in Durham, England, workmen inadvertently freed a living toad from a block of magnesium limestone 25 feet below ground level.'"

"It doesn't look living to me," said Dana.

"Duh, Einstein. Jeremiah _was_ a bullfrog, but he's long dead and formaldehyded now. Here's the newspaper article, and there's the rock that entombed it for 6,000 years." He pointed to the framed newspaper clipping titled LIVE TOAD FOUND IN SOLID ROCK, and a pale, crumbly chunk of limestone that bore a smooth, partial, reversed relief of a huddled toad. "It's a toad geode," he snickered.

Dana rolled her eyes, a gesture lost in the dark. "You are _such_ a dork."

"You are _such_ a nerd."

"Me? You're the nerd who memorized every Ripley's Believe It of Not book."

"You're the nerd who wants to be a porno-girl-science-teacher. You should be curious about this kind of stuff."

"I don't waste my time on fake crap. For all we know, they could've dunked the stupid thing in Ringer's solution."

"What's that, Little Miss Einstein?"

"It's sterile saline mixed with some other chemicals that keeps a heart beating outside the body. Duh."

"And why would guys breaking rocks have that stuff? Duh."

"OK, then. Maybe similar chemicals in the rock kept the toad alive until it could breathe oxygen again."

"So you do believe that a toad can survive being locked in stone for millennia?"

"No, Mr. Believe-It-or-Not Junior; this whole room is filled with fake junk. It looks like some traveling rip-off show. It's cool and all, but Spam-jam-dumb Bob seems like he wanted to gyp people with freaky weirdness."

"You're no fun, you know that? You think everything's gotta fit into your—dammit." The flashlight beam dimmed to a bead of dull orange, illumining nothing but its own bulb and reflector. The boy slapped it to no avail.

Dana observed how, without her flashlight to throw incandescence, the strange blue light from the glass panel washed the chamber in a clear, cold sheen that muted, but did not shift, the colors of the objects around them. The collective shadows were anything but blue; they puddled around the leathery half-monkey-half-fish "mermaid" and the dilapidated carousel of the zoetrope in russet shades. "I should've brought one of the candles," she mused.

"You could ignite one of your farts instead," said the boy.

"I never—I didn't fart."

"Something smelly sure scared away that Thing in the tunnel. Tunnel Your Anus."

"While you're here beating the same stupid joke to death, I'm going to jump down and get a candle."

Despite the force of her declaration, Dana hesitated at the opening to the lower chamber. Previously her fortress and refuge, the chamber's sudden absorbent darkness obscured vision, swallowed sound, and threatened to deaden the sense of touch if she dare reach inside to grope for her bag.

"Pluto is the god of Underpants," he prompted.

"UnderWORLD, doofus," she retorted, and jumped down.

The initial scramble to orient herself with the remembered direction of the tunnel exit caused her to scrape her elbow. She winced, but crouched and splayed her arms low, fingertips hovering mere inches over the cold, foreign stone of the chamber floor. Nothing but blackness could she see in every corner; her rationed gasps supplied the only sound.

Her palm grazed something smooth and unmoving and clammy on the floor; she succumbed to a shudder before recalling that she had spilled wax some weeks before.

Her bag remained elusively out of her immediate grasp. She reluctantly lurched from her place beneath the trap door opening and its inadequate blue glow into further darkness, hoping that the next thing she touched were her bag, and that the next thing she saw were matchlight.

"Hurry up," called the boy.

"Chickenshit," she muttered. After endless seconds, her groping hands met nothing but stone. She shifted again, moving from the comfort of an investigated area into more unknown. The fingers of her left hand touched a sticky, cold, yielding surface, causing her to pull away reflexively.

_Nuclear Mutant Toad_ was the first thought to spring to her mind; _impossible_ was the second.

She convinced herself that she had discovered her bag, and reached again in the same direction.

Her fingers encountered nothing but stone. Dana did not know whether to feel relieved or exasperated, but continued to probe the unseen chamber floor, inch by inch.

"What's taking you so long?" the boy called impatiently.

"You and that mermaid need some private time together."

"Laugh it up, but the Fiji Mermaid is an outstanding example of the art of taxidermy."

"Sewing a dead monkey to a dead fish butt and calling it a mermaid is an outstanding example of the art of dorkitude. Crap. I can't find the bag."

"You're kidding."

"I can't see anything. It was just here."

"Never send a girl to do a man's job," he said, adroitly jumping into the lower chamber.

After a few minutes of bumping heads or shoes, Dana and the boy found nothing but four empty corners.

"Someone's playing tricks on us," concluded the boy.

_Charlie_, thought Dana angrily. _No, Bill Junior, that turd bucket._ "Then it's time for me to kick his ass," Dana huffed, and started to exit the chamber. "You and Fish Butt can stay here."

At the juncture to Tunnel Neptune, Dana paused and listened. The weight of earth pressing on all sides of the buried concrete pipe created a sound-proof solidity broken only by the faint, distant hiss of cold, flowing air. The complete darkness fooled her eyes into seeing shades of gray where she knew no light existed.

Dana felt a tug at her ankle.

"Get a move on. If I don't get out of these tunnels soon, I'm gonna be a hunchback forever."

"Do you have the flashlight?" she asked.

"Why? It's dead."

"It belongs to Ahab—my dad. I can't leave it here."

"Screw it."

"Screw you. Get out of my way and let me get it." Dana crawled ungracefully backwards as the boy retreated into the chamber. The chamber was pitch black. The blue glow was gone. The trap door was closed. Dana blamed the boy, who denied the accusation.

"You remember how heavy and noisy that stone tile is. How the hell could I have sealed it tight in less than a minute?"

"You're the one who's been playing all the tricks. You and my brother must be in on this whole thing."

"I don't even know your brother, besides that he beat off with your favorite porno mag and you wrote that he's gay."

Dana held her tongue, and felt for the edges of the trap door in the ceiling; as far as she could tell, the stone was one solid piece.

"I'm splitting now," announced the boy. "It's been nice meeting you and your crucified toad."

Dana reluctantly followed him out of the chamber and into Tunnel Neptune. She began to wish that she were in front of him as they crawled through the monotonous dark; the growing sense of menace behind her goaded her to move faster than proximity allowed.

At the juncture to the last tunnel, the boy stopped suddenly. "There's something up Uranus," he whispered. "I think it's your bag."

Dana almost smacked him on the rump, but discovered that his pun was not entirely gratuitous. In the dim light of the main tunnel, her book bag lay as though someone had carefully placed it there.

As soon as she touched the bag, a strange croak or bark sounded from within the tunnel they had recently vacated. In a remarkable feat of agility and speed, both of them exited Tunnel Uranus before another croak could menace them.

The late afternoon had become early twilight; the gully was awash with long, lavender shadows as the sky overhead flaunted the golden pinks of sunset.

"Ever wonder why there are no snakes or spiders or other vermin in those tunnels?" joked the boy. In the ephemeral light, Dana could finally see how tall and prepossessing he was.

She became suddenly shy, and looked at her shoes. "Are you gonna be here tomorrow?" she asked. "Maybe we can open the trap door again."

"Nah. My mom and I leave tomorrow morning. We're looking for my—um, a relative."

"Who? Your deadbeat dad, for Father's Day?"

"No." His face, which had been open and amiable, suddenly became blank and closed.

Dana immediately regretted her jibe. "I hope you find him. Or her. Guess I better get home before my mom gives my dinner to my brother." She punctuated her joke with an nervous, apologetic laugh.

"Yeah. Well, uh, bye." The boy remained detached and uncharmed. "It's been interesting." He started off in a direction opposite her way home.

"Wait a second," she called to him. "I want you to have this." From the bag she had drug dexterously through the tunnel, she pulled out the Italian porno magazine.

He scoffed. "What would I do with your annotated lesbo porn?"

"It's not lesbo porn," she said angrily.

"If it's not lesbo porn, then why did you draw smiley faces on pictures of naked boobs?"

Dana ducked her head, trying to hide the flush of embarrassment that reddened her face.

"I think you should sneak it back under your brother's bed." The tone of his voice had changed from a condescending monotone to a conspiratorial whisper.

"Give it back to him? If he doesn't kill me, he'll break my fingers."

"He won't hurt you; you're his sister." The boy reached out and cupped Dana's shoulder in a comforting but unexpectedly intimate manner. In the transition from afternoon sun to twilight, his eyes gleamed with a surprisingly gentle hazel color. She had assumed his eyes were blue, like her brother Charlie's eyes. Away from the darkness, he was decidedly not her brother, and more than a random boy who had blundered into an exciting adventure with her.

She trembled under his hand, flustered for reasons that she had no experience to identify. "How do you know he won't hurt me?" she whispered, her mouth suddenly dry. "Do you even have a sister?"

The boy withdrew his hand and caught a short breath, trying to form an answer. A brief welling of loss blurred the hazel eyes; he trailed a fingertip across her cheek in fleeting, tentative motion, then _blanked_ his face again, turned, and walked away.

Dana watched him leave until he was out of sight—his tall, lanky frame becoming smaller with distance, blue shirt, rumpled jeans, dirty sneakers finally vanishing behind the scrub brush. She realized too late that she had not said goodbye. She hoped that not saying it meant a jillion chances more.

"I wonder if I'll ever see him again," she asked aloud.

As she passed the tunnel opening on her way out of the gully, she saw her scuffed but intact Magic 8 Ball lying in the grit and weeds. In the circular window of the toy, the words on the icosahedron floating in dark blue liquid read WITHOUT A DOUBT.


End file.
